HN Explorer

Shopify's developer focus is nothing but marketing spin

11 points by amoopa ↗ HN
Shopify just released "a new product" with their Commerce Components: https://www.shopify.com/commerce-components

It seems like their latest attempt to cater to developers since first Shopify+, and later Hydrogen, failed to pick up traction. While I welcome the focus on developers and good APIs, it is still striking how much this once again seems to be unsubstantiated in a truly new product.

Instead, they re-packeted their old product into yet another bad developer experience:

- their APIs are inconsistent and cause headache to work with

- whenever you want to build in any customizations, you end up hacking another Frankenstein together

- docs are super thin when you start drilling a bit into the details multi-currency is gone (have managed 8 shops because of 8 different currencies)

- support is expensive and getting small roadmap prioritization, even for large projects, is almost impossible

The list goes on...

Sorry for the rant, but getting frustrated with their way of doing marketing instead of product innovation.

3 comments

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neximo64
It would be much easier to take seriously if you were making an app for Shopify vs a competitor
amoopa
I have been building with Shopify before. They have a great product for small merchants and people just getting started - but as soon as you scale and want more customization, that is where you meet the blocker.
trey-jones
Your biases in mind, this is hardly surprising. It seems most companies would rather devote the majority of resources to marketing, rather than to engineering/production to actually fix problems and build a better product.

There are probably valid reasons for this. I don't want to step on any toes (yes I do), but it takes about 2 brain cells to come up with a new marketing gimmick compared to whatever value you want to assign to actual problem solving. Marketing is the lazy approach, in my opinion, but also there simply isn't enough problem solving talent available to solve all the problems. It seems we're coming around to education again... I'll leave off.